By the end of 2018, Bashar al-Assad and his allies had eliminated the major rebel strongholds in southern Syria, and the U.S. was preparing to abandon the northeast. In February, Assad’s forces began a largely successful assault on the last pocket of resistance in the country’s northwest. Yet despite these developments, Jonathan Spyer writes, the regime is by no means in a position to declare victory:

[W]hile the civil war that began in 2011 may effectively be over, events in the country indicate that no clear winner has emerged from the conflict. Syria appears set to remain divided, impoverished, and dominated by competing external powers. The Assad regime [itself] is beset by infighting at top levels, even as significant unrest returns to regime-controlled areas. . . . Syria remains territorially divided, with the regime controlling just over 60 percent of the country.

But even in the areas under his control, Assad is not succeeding in returning stability and re-consolidating his rule. The problem is first of all economic. Syria is a smoking ruin. Neither Assad, nor his patrons in Moscow and Tehran, have the money to begin desperately needed reconstruction. The Europeans and the U.S., meanwhile, will not offer assistance so long as the regime refuses all prospects of political transition.

This stalemate is not endlessly sustainable. Lack of money makes rebuilding impossible. This in turn leads to renewed instability. The economic fortunes of the Assads have deteriorated significantly further in recent weeks. The Syrian pound is in freefall.

Bashar al-Assad is not about to fall. But severe economic deterioration, regime infighting, re-ignited unrest from below, and fresh sanctions about to bite are combining to place his regime under renewed, severe pressure. It is all a long way from the victory parades of just two years ago.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.